Archive for the ‘updates’ Category

A map is an incredibly powerful way to get an overall sense of an area, but it doesn’t give an accurate sense of what a place actually looks like. That’s where photos come in.

Now, by integrating with photo site Panoramio, mappery for the first time unites thousands of maps with thousands of nearby photos to bring your map exploration experience to the next level.

To grasp the exploration power of the map and photo combo, check out the Kaieteur Falls Trail Map of the famous waterfall in Guyana. This trail map gives a good overall lay-of-the-land, but the dramatic description “plummets 741 feet into the rainforest and is one of the most powerful waterfalls in the world” begs the question: what does Kaieteur Falls really look like?

To grasp the true enormity of the falls, just scroll down to see a collection of nearby photos:

Nearby photos now appear on every map page in mappery (except sometimes when there are no photos available near a map).

Here’s another one for you to check out of Dartmoor National Park in England. Brings the map region to life, doesn’t it?

Would love to know what you think about this latest feature. If you have any ideas to make the exploration experience even better please let me know.

Now when you click to view any fullsize jpg, gif, and png map on mappery, there’s a new, improved way to zoom, pan, see basic info, and easily jump to nearby maps. Upon initial view, the map is shrunk to fit the size of your browser window. Clicking the map will zoom in to the actual size and allow you to pan around by dragging the hand (just like in Google Maps). To re-fit to the size of the browser window, click the ‘Fit to Window’ button in the upper-right.

Also, the top strip of information now shows the map title, the creation date (if known), and the 3 closest maps to the center of the current map. Clicking one of the nearby maps takes you to more information about that map. The goal here is to improve the map discovery and browsing process a bit.

As you’ve moved through life, the dream has never faded: one day, you’ll have your very own room dedicated to your vast map collection. Like drawing rooms, billiards halls, and personal bowling lanes, the “map room” remains the exclusive personal retreat of the lucky few. If you’re like me, your map room at best amounts to a dusty shoebox or two full of old maps.

But no more! mappery introduces your very own map room that will quench your life-long desires. Well, OK, maybe “room” is the wrong word. We’re talking a virtual room – your very own map page.

Now, when you sign up for mappery, you get your own map room that’s shaped by your contributions over time. When you add maps and comments to mappery, they show up in your map room. The room shows a map view of all of your most recently added maps, as well as a keyword cloud allowing you to quickly jump to a particular type of map. You can use your map room to keep track of maps important to you and peruse them whenever you want. (see an example map room)

OK, I’ve been sitting on this one for a bit. A few weeks ago mappery released a completely new world map directory with several notable features. Every country in the world (244 of them here) has a separate country map page with the following:

Also, it’s worth noting here that when anyone adds a map to mappery, it is now automatically added to the appropriate country or state/province page. If it isn’t, let us know about it and we’ll be sure set things right around here.

Adobe’s PDF is a great file format for highly detailed maps and its vector qualities scale lines and text impressively.As a result, a lot of the best maps out there are in the PDF format.However, PDF maps are difficult to find and view quickly.No known website currently makes this easy.

To address this problem, mappery now automatically generates thumbnails of PDF maps. This allows quick and easy browsing of all PDF maps in the mappery collection.Never again will you have to click and load a big PDF map just to get a sense of what it is…just browse around in mappery and get a quick visual flavor of multitudes of PDFs. This was a total pet peeve for me; look for other new features soon.

To illustrate the improvement, here’s what thumbnails for PDF maps in mappery used to look like vs. what you can see now:

Yesterday Google announced bringing Google Earth to the web browser. Up until now, to see the amazing 3D views of Google Earth required downloading and installing an application and viewing outside of your web browser. Now, all that’s needed to see Google Earth in your browser is a browser plug in, similar to Microsoft’s Virtual Earth.

Once you have the plug in, you’ll now be able to see 3D views of the map area for every map in the mappery collection. Just click the ‘Earth’ button in any Google Map and the view and controls will switch to the same as in Google Earth.

Perhaps not earth-shattering news, but mappery has added the ability to rate maps in the mappery collection on a 1-5 globe scale (5 being just plain awesome maps). Anyone can rate a map by clicking through to the map. Also, accessible from the home page is an ordered list of the top rated maps in mappery. As the mappery community and collection continues to grow, ratings will be an easy way to get a sense of the community’s thoughts on map quality.

Now available in all Google Maps on mappery is the new ‘Terrain’ option. Just click the button to see a cool looking new shaded relief layer of any location. Looks quite professional and gives a clean sense of geographic features such as mountain ranges. This mode looks particularly nice when looking for outdoor activity maps such as hiking, kayaking, mountain biking, and skiing.